


Too many tears have been shed / for the same fear / We need to save this world

by The_Exile



Category: Star Ocean: The Second Story | Second Evolution
Genre: Apocalyptic Doom, Community: tic_tac_woe, Gen, Mass Death, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 18:03:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12940752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Rena finds out what happened on Expel after they had left but refuses to give in to anger and despair.





	Too many tears have been shed / for the same fear / We need to save this world

**Author's Note:**

> written for bingo prompt 'knocked out of orbit'

They had tried to hide it from Rena but she immediately began to suspect something was amiss. She was a healer, had been responsible for the village's medical care since she was a child and had slowly expanded the range at which she traveled to provide aid, and she had learned how to tell when someone was trying to hide bad news from her, as well as how to break news to others that they might not want to hear. This politician, this Mayor Nall fellow, was good at it too but evidently some of the rest of the party had caught on or been told, and they weren't as practiced at diplomacy. 

Rena's home - or at least, the planet she had lived out most of her childhood on - was gone. The entire world, all of it, at once, evaporated as it was struck by an impact that knocked it out of orbit so that even the survivors of the initial blow would have died when the planet lost the precarious life-supporting balance of its position near the sun and moon. People had even begun dying in the floods when the gravitational pull was disturbed by the satellite that had knocked into it. 

The move had been deliberate, although not maliciously aimed at her home world. Expel was merely a stepping stone, a link in a strategic chain. It had been knocked out of orbit to produce enough disruption to affect an energy barrier over another world, Nede, to enable that world to be invaded. The knowledge that so many lives had been treated that way - and that the Ten Wise Men saw practically everyone except themselves as equally expandable - made her feel worse about the situation, not better, despite the lack of direct malice towards her.

She had been furious at Nall, too, and those of her friends who shared the information, for trying to hide such important news from her. After being given time to calm down, though, she realised that they were only trying to protect her mental state during a time when she still needed to keep a clear head so she could fight on. 

When she met the enemy again, she couldn't even feel true anger towards them. They were largely conditioned to act that way by some sort of magitechnological programming, and besides, as Berle had pointed out, she placed equally low value on the lives of those she called 'monsters', even though she knew some of them were sentient, that they had motivations and causes that they also cared for, that they considered Expel and Nede to be just as much their homes. 

No, she could not justify anger, could not afford to lose herself to conflicting emotions, so she reached out instead to the serene warrior's spirit that Dias had taught her and the will to protect those truly important to her that she had been granted by Claude.

For them, she would fight, and win, and stay alive despite all.


End file.
